My vital habit of disbelieving everything (especially instinctive things) and my natural inclination to insincerity neutralize all obstacles to the constant application of my method.

What I basically do is convert other people into my dreams. I take up their opinions, which I develop through my reason and intuition in order to make them my own (having no opinions, I can adopt theirs as well as any others) and to conform them to my taste, turning their personalities into things that have an affinity with my dreams.

I’ve so favoured dreaming over real life that I’m able, in my verbal encounters (the only kind I have), to keep on dreaming and to keep following, through the opinions and feelings of others, the fluid course of my own amorphous personality.

Other people are channels or conduits in which the ocean’s water flows according to their fancy, and the shimmering of that water in the sunlight defines their curved path much better than their empty dryness could do.

Although it sometimes seems to my hasty analysis that I’m the parasite of others, what really occurs is that I force them to be parasites of my subsequent emotion. My life inhabits the shells of their personalities. I reproduce their footsteps in my spirit’s clay, absorbing them so thoroughly into my consciousness that I, in the end, have taken their steps and walked in their paths even more than they.

Due to my habit of dividing myself, following two distinct mental operations at the same time, it’s generally the case that as I lucidly and intensely adapt myself to what others are feeling, I simultaneously undertake a rigorously objective analysis of their unknown self, what they think and are. And thus in my dreaming, without ever interrupting my reverie, I not only live the distilled essence of their sometimes dead emotions, I also discover and classify the intricate links between their various intellectual and spiritual energies, which were often lying dormant in their soul.

Nor, while all this is going on, do their physiognomies and dress and gestures escape my notice. I live their dreams, their instinctive nature, and their body and its postures all at the same time. In a sweeping, unified dispersion, I ubiquitize* myself in them, and at each moment of our conversation I create, and am, a multitude of selves – conscious and unconscious, analysed and analytical – joined together as in a spread fan.